AUSD retains counsel to fight Measure H lawsuits

For those of you who haven’t seen it, the Alameda Unified School District released a statement Wednesday regarding its legal team and the fight against the Measure H lawsuits. Here it is in its entirety:

Two Alameda taxpayers have brought separate lawsuits to invalidate Measure H, a new parcel tax to support Alameda schools that over two-thirds of Alameda voters approved in last June’s election. The tax, which will raise over $16 million in the next four years, will help close the budget gap caused by a reduction in State funding.

In other school news the group, Alamedans For Fair Taxation, a group for which no one, to my knowledge, has stepped up and claimed public responsiblity, has a double-length, unsigned editorial in this week’s Alameda Sun. While we’re all used to pseudonymous postings on the Internet (I don’t much like ‘em, but they’re here), it continues to mystify me that no one from this group that is, as I understand it, responsible for funding at least one of the legal challenges to the popular parcel tax, doesn’t step up and say, “Hello. This is who we are and why we’re doing what we’re doing.” It’s all well and good to disagree—many reasonable people disagree much of the time—but the refusal to take a public stand (while having a willingness to fund a lawsuit) continues to confound me.

epearlman

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http://actionalameda.org/actionalamedanewsblog/2008/10/13/update-on-ausd-funds-held-by-city-of-alameda/ David Howard

It’s no mystery while Alamedans for Fair Taxation don’t put their business names up there – it’s explained clearly in the Alameda Sun article you reference. I quote: “Despite the backlash against us, as evidence by letters-to-the-editors, threatening phone calls to our businesses, and even hostile outbursts in our stores…” and “[it's] painful to be singled out and castigated as anti-school and anti-Alameda.” Unfortunately, these attempts at threats and intimidation are pretty common among the pro-establishment forces here in Alameda.

And there has been talk of boycotting the stores behind the lawsuits, although I can’t fathom how a boycott against a yacht sales dealership would work. How often can one not buy a yacht when they otherwise might?

Eve, you recently spilled some ink decrying some childish name-calling – why don’t you also chastise the people making the threatening phone calls and the outbursts in the local shops?